GET TO THA CHOPPA TWOOO!!2 (Xbox 360) review

"Get to tha Choppa Two‘s most remarkable aspect is how it takes a foundation, then, rather than build upon it, arms itself with a shovel and digs deeper into the muck."

Here’s the thing; writing these reviews isn’t as easy as I’ve been making it look all these years. For the most part, it takes time and effort to come up with a finely honed .doc file that the rest of the Internet will then use to call your credibility into question. There’s drafts and edits and revisions and HTMLing in screens, then deciding on what you feel is the right dosage of pretentious hack to curry favour with your target audience. It’s not a glamorous life and, a lot of the time, there’s a lot of things I’d rather be doing. That’s why I pseudo-love Get to tha Choppa!!1 2: not because it’s a good game -- It’s not -- but so little effort has been put into disguising it from the previous title, I can just copy and paste last year’s review and make the odd minor edit.

Ahem.

Get to tha Choppa Get to tha Choppa Twoooo has precious little to do with Arnie pre-politics and more to do with the zombie apocalypse, timed button presses and a sadistic helicopter pilot. Backdropped to (the exact same) odd techno song about someone’s proficiency in a ring, you control a faceless unfortunate (but this time with poorly drawn breasts) chased rather swiftly by hordes of flesh-eating zombies. Your salvation? The helicopter (still) keeping perfect pace with you. The problem? The pilot is (still) clearly enjoying your plight a bit more than he should.

This means your chance of salvation is zero and, instead, allows you to switch focus from surviving to grabbing up as many points as you can before you fall. Your futile dash aimed to prolong your life is hindered by three main obstacles: arbitrary landmines you need to leap over, zombies running right at you that you need to gun down, and the odd missile the ‘copter pilot will fire at you (he wants you to think it’s at the sprinting horde on your heels -- don’t let him fool you!) that you’ll need to duck under. Leisurely at first, the pace will slowly pick up until you need to mash the corresponding buttons with split-second timing in order to leap the mines, duck under a missile the second you land, then pop back up firing. At these speeds, the game’s as involving as it gets, and a respectable survival streak does feel like an accomplishment. Then you do it again. And again. And again.

BUT! In a cunning attempt to derail the straight rehash of last year’s review, so so throw in a fiendish new twist! Rather than just dangle the carrot of safety in front of your nose while staying just out of reach and launch the odd rocket at you, the sadistic helicopter pilot will now try to grant you arbitrary power-ups!

What’s not cunning is this one slight deviation away from their previous title is in fact a large step backwards. If the first Choppa game had anything going for it, it was that it was an unashamed point rush and, in this, the only reason to play it was to rack up bigger and bigger high scores and rub them in the face of friend and faceless internet stalker alike. Having a bigger score meant that you were simply better; the playing fields where perfectly even because everyone just had the exact same three obstacles thrown at them at a slightly up scaling speed. It took very few turns before I had already stuffed my previous high score thanks to the inclusion of a points multiplier. There’s other that grant you varying forms of limited invincibility, but their use is obsolete in comparison. The game’s only purpose is to score points. Your ability to score big no longer hinges on your reflexes, but on sheer simple luck on what boons you’ll be randomly granted.

Get to tha Choppa Two‘s most remarkable aspect is how it takes a foundation, then, rather than build upon it, arms itself with a shovel and digs deeper into the muck.

…and that it allowed me to only have to pen 50% of a new review, Thanks, guys!

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overdrive posted November 29, 2011:

Nice. Very nice. Witty intro followed by clever rehashing and then adding the one new element that ruins everything.

One minor thing. Please don't have me killed, WQ, since I know it's your job to point out all the E(mp)RRORS in Gary's reviews, but in the first sentence or so, shouldn't that be credibility instead of creditability? Or is creditability an actual word that means roughly the same as credibility?

EmP posted November 29, 2011:

I'll have you know that creditability is totally a real word. So, yeah.

Thanks for reading!

Masters posted November 30, 2011:

Nicely done, you. That was a great intro to warm us up for your rehash. More to come?

EmP posted December 02, 2011:

Masters: Write something before September.
*does so, in a half-arsed fashion*
MasterS: This means you can and should write even more still!

I can't win.

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